Various types of systems have been developed for handling travel itineraries and income tax preparation; incorporating a number of different technologies. U.S. Pat. No. 6,009,408 issued to Buchanan is directed to automated processing of travel related expenses. Computer systems associated with the Internal Revenue Service can be linked with the travel information processing system by a suitable communication subsystem collects information supporting tax returns from customers. Because the taxable income of a particular customer may often be reduced by the amount of travel related expenses incurred by travelers associated with customer, customers may request that receipt information kept in travel information processing system be sent to IRS system.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,237,499 issued to Garback, is directed to a computer travel planning system. A computer based system for processing travel requests directed to a specific venue from individual members of a sponsored group is provided. The system comprises a database containing a venue file including information regarding the specific venue, a group member file for each individual member of the group, a travel policy file containing information on pre-selected vendors of various travel services, and a city code file containing codes corresponding to a plurality of city airport locations. The database includes a travel policy file that contains information on pre-selected airline carriers, pre-selected room accommodation providers, and pre-selected ground transportation providers.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,948,040, issued to DeLorme et al. is directed to a travel reservation information and planning system. Menus generated by this system enable flexible user inquiries accessing selectable geographic, topical, temporal and transactional data records and relational processing. Some menus provide further capabilities: e.g., routing, topical searching, searches of event calendars, almanacs, appointment books, related itinerary schedule, trip budgeting issues, and travel arrangement availabilities for other goods/services offers. An online computer aided routing system enables input of selectable travel origin, destination, and waypoints to compute travel route, available transportation services, costs, options, and schedules. The system provides the capability to determine the mode or modes of travel required to reach each destination, make the reservations associated with the travel, find the accommodations and activities available, plus take advantage of diverse, special offers for goods and services from participating providers.
U.S. Pat. No. H1,830 issued to Petrimoulx et al. is directed to a system for use-tax determination. The system relates to computer implemented tax preparation and tax submission accounting, and the system is directed to providing a system that enables use-tax accrual and determination. The system provides a machine for use-tax determination which has: (A) transaction record acquisition logic for acquiring transaction information characterizing purchases of goods and services and generating transaction records; (B) use-tax logic; and (C) tax rate acquisition logic for acquiring tax jurisdiction codes, at least one inclusive accounting group registry respective to taxes, and tax information respective to the tax jurisdiction codes for plurality of state jurisdictions, and generating a data schema with data elements describing the inclusive accounting group registry, tax jurisdiction codes, and tax information.
While other variations exist, the above-described systems for travel planning and tax return preparation are typical of those encountered in the prior art. It is an objective of the present invention to provide a system that can determine the per diem expense allowances for a taxpayer required to stay overnight for work purposes in any city identified by the Internal Revenue Service. It is a further objective to provide a means for determining the cities visited by a merchant seaman based upon the identity of his ship and his dates of employment upon it. It is a still further objective of the invention to provide means to prepare complete printed tax returns including a printout of the travel locations with appropriate rates for the taxpayer, relevant code sections underlined, etc. It is yet a further objective to provide an accurate system that will permit preparation of travel-related tax returns with substantially reduced manual effort on the part of tax preparation personnel.
While some of the objectives of the present invention are disclosed in the prior art, none of the inventions found include all of the requirements identified.